Pinpricks of Light

Today, my words are lacking. This last week and most of last weekend my words have been lacking, so I offer bits from previous writings, and a poet whose words I have shared before.

It is often nothing more than the gentle acts of caring that see us through the day. I wrote in my snipit style memoir of this gentleness: 

“[There] continues to be something in the word during the showers of spite; something in that smile saying, I am listening and I hear you, while the fog of muted emotion fills the air and the mind; something in those patient eyes and open hands . . .” These “somethings” can be painful; I want to do it myself, fix it myself. But that won’t do. It doesn’t work. We need someone to talk to, albeit frightening. We carry eachother through life. “[We] owe [our]  existence to others, to those who offer the simple words, the smile, the kind eyes, the gentle hands, to a broke soul. They reassure [us] that [our hearts are] beating, and that maybe, one more day or minute or moment is worth the while.”

Small but Urgent Request to the Unknowable

Whatever small nugget of kindness we carry,

that shy opal I picture buried in gray folds

of a cortex evolved to flinch at fire

and whittle sharp sticks when beasts

stalk too close; whatever prompts

bereaved widows to offer you coffee then

the guestbook, and parched sailors adrift

to share the day’s thimble of water,

and mothers to lift the most bent and broken

children with joy and glad for the work of it;

whatever iota of caring has survived

the millennia’s hardships, ice age and terror

and the simple tedium of walking upright—

maybe it’s no bigger now than a seed

in a fig—tonight I call for it, call

with my dry mouth from this cold room

clouded by my being alive

on a planet whose true gravity

eludes me; let that pinprick of light

multiply in the sky’s nightly leather

and in the pupil of each eye. Let me seek it

in the large, crazed creatures whose shadows

I fear most, in myself, for instance.

Kneeling, I poke at this ash-heaped hearth in hope

of some faint imagining, grateful for that.

Mary Karr